Managing your iRacing companion apps

The single most common “my overlay won’t show” fix is one checkbox: iRacing must run in windowed or borderless-windowed mode, not exclusive fullscreen, or no overlay will draw on top of it. The second most common complaint is the chore of launching five apps before every race. Both have clean answers, and neither is documented in iRacing’s own UI.

This page is the operational layer under iRacing companion apps and tools and telemetry and overlay tools: those pages tell you which apps to run; this one tells you how to start them all at once and why they sometimes refuse to appear.

Fix overlays that won’t show: borderless, not fullscreen

An on-screen overlay is a separate transparent window that sits above iRacing. Exclusive fullscreen hands the GPU’s display output entirely to the game, so any other window gets pushed behind it and you never see your relative box, delta bar, or input trace. Borderless-windowed mode renders a full-screen-sized window with no title bar, which looks identical to fullscreen but lets other windows paint on top.

To switch, open Options > Graphics in the sim, turn Full Screen off and Border off, then restart iRacing so the border actually clears. The RaceLab setup guide spells out the same step: iRacing needs to run windowed and borderless or you get overlay issues. This applies to RaceLab, iOverlay, Kapps, and any browser-source overlay. The lone exception is SimHub, which can inject its overlays regardless of display mode because it hooks the render path differently.

A few related gotchas people hit after fixing the display mode:

• A white Windows title bar or grey box around an overlay is a Windows styling problem, not an iRacing one. Close iRacing and run the overlay’s preview/race mode on its own to confirm; updating Windows 11 or toggling the overlay’s transparency setting usually clears it.
• Triple monitors with G-Sync can stutter in borderless. Most triple-screen drivers leave NVIDIA Surround off and accept borderless, since native triple rendering plus overlays is the simpler path. See triple monitor setup for the display side.
• An overlay frozen on a stale track map is almost always fixed by closing and restarting that overlay app, not the sim.

Tame the launch routine

A typical pre-race stack is Crew Chief, Garage 61, RaceLab or iOverlay, Trading Paints, your wheel software (Fanatec, Simucube, Moza), and maybe SimHub for a dash or bass shakers. Starting six programs by hand every session is the friction people complain about most, and there are three ways to kill it.

Community launchers

Purpose-built launchers detect where each app is installed, start them all from one button, show which are running, and close the whole group when you quit iRacing. The well-regarded open-source options:

• iRacing Companion Launcher (MIT, free) — a modern GUI that tracks the process tree of every app it starts and closes the entire tree on shutdown, so nothing is left running.
• iRacing Application Manager (MIT, free) — configure your tools (SimHub, Garage 61, etc.), then start/stop them or set them to autostart with the manager.
• iRacingManager — the original, long the community default. It is no longer actively maintained, which is why newer forks exist, but it still does the job and adds per-app startup and shutdown delays (useful when Trading Paints needs a head start, or a wheelbase driver must load before SimHub).

DisplayMagician: launch and display profile in one shortcut

If your real headache is also switching to triples and the right audio device before racing, DisplayMagician (GPL, free) does more than a launcher. One Windows shortcut changes your display profile, switches audio output, pre-starts your helper apps, launches the sim, then reverts everything when you close it. It can be bound to a Stream Deck key. It is overkill if you only need apps to start, but the obvious choice if your monitor or audio layout changes between desktop use and racing.

The free do-it-yourself route

Plenty of racers skip launchers entirely. A Windows .bat file with one start "" "path\to\app.exe" line per app launches the whole stack on a double-click, and a Stream Deck button can fire the same script. The catch the community flags: iRacing and iOverlay are the two that misbehave in batch files — iOverlay sometimes opens without the overlay appearing (close and reopen it), and launching the iRacing UI via its protocol link is finicky. If the .bat route fights you on those two, a launcher that targets them properly is less hassle than debugging the script.

A note on AI-generated launchers

When new launchers get posted, the consensus reaction is caution about closed, AI-generated tools: you are installing software that starts other software, and if nobody can read the code, nobody can vouch for what it does. The practical rule is to prefer open-source launchers where the code is public, or write your own .bat. The launchers above are all open-source.

What still has to be running, and when

A launcher solves starting the apps; it does not change when each one needs to be live. The order that actually matters:

• Trading Paints must be running before the session loads so liveries download in time. If you join late, you and others appear in default paint.
• Wheel software (Fanatec, Simucube, Moza) should load before SimHub if SimHub drives your dash or shakers, so it sees the device.
• Crew Chief and overlays can start any time before you go green; they attach to the live session.
• Garage 61’s agent runs quietly in the background and syncs laps and setups whether or not you opened its window. See setup sharing and databases for how that sync places .sto files in your iRacing folder.

Get the stack starting cleanly and the borderless checkbox set once, and the only thing left to manage is your schedule. The desktop apps live on your rig; Startlight ($9.99 iOS app, Home Screen widget, and Apple Watch app) is the one that lives on your phone, showing what session is running and time-to-green when you are away from the PC.